Edward Rhodes – His Booke

In my last post I discussed the importance of historical documents to my research, just prior to visiting Oxford to examine some ship logs from the seventeenth century. I was unsure of just what I would find, but what I found was more valuable than I had imagined. In the Bodleian Library at Oxford University I was able to access a logbook, written by a sailor called Edward Rhodes, dated to 1670-1676. This book was aboard four different ships in these years, crossing the Atlantic twelve times in all on six round trip voyages between London and the Chesapeake Bay, both to Maryland and Virginia.

On an average day, Rhodes mentions the wind, weather, and how far they traveled. Each day at sea, from making it past Plymouth and until reaching the capes of the Chesapeake Bay (or the other way around in the return direction), Rhodes gives the latitude and relative longitude of their position. Until now, we could only speculate on what the Northern passage across the Atlantic looked like, but now we can see exactly what course they took! Even more interestingly though, is that until the mid-eighteenth century, longitudinal calculations were based more on reckoning than actual position. That Rhodes was writing these down, and consistent in his end points, really shows that they were able to determine this with a degree of accuracy. London, or in the return the Bay, are always set to 0 degrees longitude, and the final entries are between 55 and 57 degrees. By today’s measurements, this should be around 75 degrees, but the consistency means that this error is manageable.

On a less than average day, Rhodes writes about the other events that occurred. On the First of January, 1672, he writes while anchored in St. Jerome’s Creek near St. Mary’s City, Maryland: ‘This day we buryed one of our Seamen Henry Miller.’ On the third of January, he writes: ‘we buryed one of our passengers named John Sippse.’ And two days later on the 5th of January, another entry: ‘We buryed our Second mate named Gabrill Hamon.’ One must wonder what has happened that caused these three deaths in such a short time. One other mention that I have seen thus far of a death on board was on another voyage from London, started in December 1672. They spent more than a month in London waiting for the right wind to get out of the River Thames. On the 5th of January 1673, a note appears in the side column saying: ‘We buryed one of our passengers ashore.’ Two horizontal lines separate this from an addendum: ‘a nigro.’ The log then states that ‘Being a sunday our (unknown word) departed this life att 4 in the morning. Then I went presently onshore and spoke for a grave for him…’ He goes on to write that he found a grave for him at a parish church, and describes what was payed for the services. Ten shillings in all. What this tells us though, is that a black man was traveling as a passenger on this ship from London to Virginia as a free man, and was of the Christian faith as he was buried at a parish church. This serves as a reminder that while race was clearly an issue at the time (otherwise it would have not been stated), it was not the only condition leading up to slavery. In the seventeenth century, slavery by the English was more a condition for those of a non-Christian faith. This shift is something I am not overly qualified to comment on, but occurs later in the 18th century.

Not all of the other special entries deal with death, however. Some of them describe events such as trade, or just something a bit special: ‘Today we caught a dolphyn.’ Of those dealing with trade, this is only mentioned in the 1671/72 voyage to ‘Merryland.’ Rhodes mentions that they sent the ship’s master ashore at St. Mary’s City to take care of customs. The next day they sailed for St. Jerome’s Creek, where the three men were lost. The log picks back up in late March, and mentions that they have now 550 hogsheads of tobacco aboard. They then sailed for St. Mary’s City and collected 160 more hogsheads. Specifically, it mentions the use of ‘Shalups,’ small tender boats brought along with the ship, to acquire the tobacco. I have heard in the past people describing the ships themselves pulling up to wharves, piers or landings at individual plantations to load the tobacco, but this is not what we see here. And archaeologically, we have not found any evidence wooden structures in the rivers dating to this time period. It seems that at this point of time, loading of the cargo was a task performed by the ship’s crew with the ship’s own tender vessels. Further, while a specific time is not mentioned to pick up the 160 hogsheads they load at St. Mary’s City, it is more than a month before it mentions that they leave the area with their load of 726 hogsheads to travel back to England. That this process took perhaps 25 days to complete just in the St. Mary’s River shows a total lack of centralization to the process.

I am now hoping to acquire more texts dating to different periods of the seventeenth century to gather comparative data, plot more routes, especially on the Southern passage, and perhaps better describe the cargoes that the ships are carrying. Further, following out this information on early calculation of longitude is an exciting and unexpected find that I hope I can elaborate on at a later date. A big thank you to Dr. Henry Miller of Historic St. Mary’s City, currently teaching in Oxford, for housing me while I scoured this document for several days!

Historical research, logbooks, and new approaches to studying trade in an historical period.

Tomorrow I am off to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University to start collecting primary source material for my PhD dissertation. With this on the immediate agenda, I will take this opportunity to discuss a bit of the research that I am doing aside from the archaeological investigation of the ballast distribution at St. Mary’s City. For persons not accustomed to the historical archaeological approach, or an historical or archaeological approach, this post might help give insight into exactly what sort of materials we use in the study of our past.

I often find myself in the company of persons whose focus is on prehistory. It amazes me the amount of data they are able to extract from very limited collections of artifacts, especially in the paleolithic. Commonly people engaged in this sort of research hear about my topic of study and remark on just how nice it must be to have everything already written down for me. I always reply that this is not entirely true, as historical documentation is not always complete, and narratives of events are more common for major events than the mundane. As an archaeologist, my chief duty is to study culture, and such events, while revealing in many ways, often leave much to be desired.

The study of trade, in which I am engaged, brings together many themes: Economic, technological, political, and environmental to name a few. Historical accounts of trade are quite few and far between, especially in seventeenth-century Britain. What we do know has been largely pieced together from numerous sources such as port records and receipt of duties. Occasionally we may find letters from, for example, a colonial governor to the British Monarch. But what can be learned from examining port records, which are essentially lists of ships entering a port with a brief description of cargo and where they have been, are the most telling for my own purposes. It is these records from which historians have been able to ascertain quantities of tobacco coming in to Britain throughout the seventeenth century. It also gives a fairly good estimate of the number of ships trading in the Chesapeake. But this is not without problems. Record keeping was not always as diligent as it could have been, and political issues often interfered with the keeping of records. Standardization of these practices was not present until the last decade of the seventeenth century, which makes the study of early seventeenth-century mercantilism difficult.

So what then will I be using for source material? Perhaps the most important sources for studying shipping actually come from the colonial records. Lois Green-Carr, Robert Menard and Lorena Walsh have spent major portions of their careers examining these records and establishing export quantities of tobacco from Maryland. These are incredibly useful. From this, we can look at the average tonnage of ships trading in the colonies, and figure out a rough estimate of the numbers of vessels involved in the trade. Pretty simple, right? Well then here comes the hard part. I don’t only wish to describe the number of ships trading, but rather to examine the development of practice and changes in productivity in the tobacco trade. For this, it sure would be nice to have some first hand accounts of the traders, discussing trade routes, difficulties in the journeys, what materials they are bringing with them, how long it takes them to arrive, what they do after arriving, how they offload their cargoes, how they load up new cargoes, if and how they assemble to travel as a fleet back to England, what they experience on the way back, and… well, you get the picture.

Fortunately though, these do exist! At Oxford tomorrow, my objective is to locate ship’s logbooks and passenger narratives giving a first hand account of the mariners on the London-Chesapeake trade route in the seventeenth century. From what I have seen in the literature, I may be the first person to examine these since 1907 when Henry F. Thompson used these logbooks to describe the activities of two of the vessels which were trading in Maryland waters. While I do not yet know much of their contents, I am very hopeful that these will provide valuable and unique insight into my research topic and answer many of the questions that I waffled on about above. Although a micro-scale approach such as this does not necessarily tell me of the broader trends in merchant shipping, I am hoping to collect enough of these to help fill in the gaps that we are missing thanks to poor recording practices in ports and all of those pesky courthouse fires that have wiped out so many of the records that were kept (many of these correspond to disagreements between colonists and their local governments). So in a way, perhaps I am in a unique and advantageous position compared to my prehistorically focused colleagues. Occasionally, we really do have things just written down for us.

So, enough of me going on about sources I do not yet have. Keep checking in for an update on what I find.

-Scott

Fieldwork So Far

Today I thought I would write a post about some of the work preformed thus far on this project. Last summer during the planning phases on this project I went out a few days to do some prep work for this summer’s field season. With the help of some archaeologist friends, first Scott Strickland and Patrick McKitrick, and the second day with Scott Strickland and Jasmine Gollup, I did some survey work attempting to locate the site. We managed to place survey markers on the beach, which had not been done before. Unfortunately, one of those was later lost (removed), so I will have to reset those points. Then came the diving. Working off of old maps of the site from the mid-1990s I searched the area for the site. I could not find it, but did find a number of features such as what was likely the spring head used for fresh water by the early colonists, a number of pilings from the Broome family’s wharf, and some other odds and ends such as a 19th century leather shoe and what was maybe an iron pitch pot. All of these things though and no site.

Dave Howe and Dawn Chesaek of the Institute for Maritime History came out to give me a hand, lending a boat and their side-scan sonar in hopes to find the site. After a few hours of scanning, we finally found the site, directly where it was thought to be. After some quick dives we realized it was covered by sediment, but that is what we would like to see from a conservation stand point. The plan for this year is to go back and survey the site in so it can be more accurately mapped, and do some surface collection of artifacts that might be associated with it. Artifact collection comes with great responsibility though, in that these artifacts must be conserved. This is costly and time consuming, but without doing this the objects brought to the surface will not survive for long after. This is one of the areas we most need funding for. If you would like to help out with this, please visit our funding page at www.gofundme.com/g0g2k and give any amount you would like!

Made it on the SHA Blog today!

I’m very excited an honored to have been featured on today’s Society for Historical Archaeology Blog! I know the internet is not exactly a new invention, but it has become such a wonderful tool for sharing information. The attention that this project has been getting, even now during its early stages has been very eye opening for me on the power of social media. Thanks Terry!

For those of you who have come across this site today because of the links on the SHA blog, welcome! I don’t have a terrible lot of content at the moment to share here on this site as the project is quite new, but please keep checking back as I update with the latest developments in research, and my daily updates from the field when my fieldwork begins.

If you are feeling particularly generous today, you can visit my funding page to help make the fieldwork that I am planning a reality. Any amount, no matter how small will be a major help in learning more about this possibly very early site. Thanks for your help!

Scott

Welcome

Hello to anyone who may stumble upon this new blog, as well as friends, colleagues, and other interested parties. I have made this blog/site to help chronicle some exciting new research into the maritime cultural past of the early Chesapeake colonies. I am carrying out this research through the University of Southampton’s Centre for Maritime Archaeology, under the supervision of Professor Jon Adams (Mary Rose, Sea Venture, Henry Grace’ Dieu, et al.) and advise of Professor Jon Oldfield.

The research is aimed gaining a better understanding of the role of merchant ship and port development throughout the seventeenth-century in the growth of the Chesapeake tobacco economy. At this time, Maryland and Virginia were the most prosperous colonies, and the tobacco producing colonies remained the most wealthy until the industrial revolution.

Throughout the life of this blog, I plan to update fairly frequently with new developments in my research. Perhaps the more exciting facet of this site though, will be the fieldwork section. I will be performing some underwater archaeological field work in the St. Mary’s River, MD, on a site thought by some to be the remains of a seventeenth-century merchant vessel. If this is the case, it will be the oldest ship remains known in the Chesapeake, and among the five oldest British sites of this type in North America. I do not yet know when fieldwork will begin, but ideally, this spring or summer. I will update daily during fieldwork, which is part of a collaborative study with Historic St. Mary’s City. The first season will be aimed at surveying the site, gathering data on its location in space, and a surface collection of diagnostic artifacts to provide a date/context for the site. The second season, if permits are granted, will be a limited excavation designed to gather ship dimensions, measure and test ballast, and identify other aspects of this ship. It should be very exciting when it gets off the ground.

So thanks for reading, and keep checking back for updates!

-Scott